I like to think it’s all a matter of mathematics. If you imagine each driver has two stats… “money” and “talent..” then obviously for a team short of cash money has more weighting value. But if a driver has enough talent then it’s enough to outweigh said monetary stat.

@dedischado I’ve never heard of left-to-right brake bias settings – but that wouldn’t be quite useful anyways, because a left brake bias would mean the car brakes harder on the left side – ie makes the left slower than the right, which would send it on a circular path without even steering.

Development of the brakes is indeed allowed – and there have been numerous advances there, though not on performance terms. Development of brakes generally has been on longevity terms as they seek to better cool brakes, etc. In terms of braking power, you’d have to find another material that is capable of a higher friction coefficient between caliper and pad – which isn’t easy.

And not only is it not easy, it wouldn’t do much. As it is today, F1 braking isn’t limited by the brakes at all, counterintuitively – it’s grip limited. At speed with downforce, a driver can push the pedal all he wants and he wouldn’t have enough power to lock the brakes, thanks to all the downforce and grip the tyres have. Then as the speed bleeds off, you have less downforce and have to decrease your braking.

If a human cannot even produce enough foot power to fully utilise the current brakes at speed, and the car doesn’t have enough grip to fully utilise the brakes at low speed – then adding brakes would be like switching from the sea to the ocean as a water source.

As such, in the perfect world, the DRS effect would equal the dirty air time loss. And on some circuits, such as Spa and Canada, the DRS effect seems to exceed the dirty air time loss.

With this in mind, either we crank up the dirty air time loss, or decrease the DRS effect, and as such my solution would be to decrease the DRS activation length on some of these circuits, and not only that – but also reduce the required time gap. Instead of 1s, how does 7 tenths sound? Then the car is clearly quicker anyways, and the other car is being held up. It would make us psychologically less bothered by DRS as we can compartmentalise the fact that the car was going past, with or without DRS

@mnmracer I think @boris is just saying that Vettel has what is, on average, 2013’s fastest car. I don’t think there’s doubting that at this point. There is no doubt he is an amazing driver – he’s recognised as one of F1’s top 3 at the moment, but you cannot deny that, over a season-so-far average, his car is probably better than the Lotus, Mercedes or Ferrari.

Kimi has a very distinct style. He builds up the turn with an early, smooth turn in. As such, he likes the car to be “on the nose” – ie to have a responsive front – because if he were to have the car more understeery, the smooth turn in would just mean the car never gets to turn in.

Alonso is much more adaptable – tell him how to drive the car and he’ll do it.

I still recommend Turn 2 Grandstand, A2 section. That’s where I sat in 2011 – clean view of the start head-on, and you get to see turn 1. You also get to see the cars move around a fair bit for the Turn 1-2-3 complex, so all’s good.